After crushing stocks last week, Fed chief Ben Bernanke is now squeezing junk bonds, causing a bump in the mergers market.

Fears the Federal Reserve will continue raising rates have pushed up interest rates on junk, or high-yield, bonds, making it more expensive for buyers to finance takeovers, especially debt-laden leveraged buyouts. The average interest rate on newly issued junk bonds jumped to 9.45 percent this month from 8.28 percent in May and investors have pulled $2.8 billion out of high-yield bond mutual funds this year, according to Standard & Poor’s.

The falloff in the junk bond market is partly responsible for the lower- than-expected bid received yesterday for Spanish-language broadcasting giant Univision, according to sources close to the deal.

Shares of the media giant plummeted 4.4 percent, or $1.56, to close at $33.84 yesterday after a group of private investment firms, including billionaire media investor Haim Saban, Providence Equity Partners, Madison Dearborn Partners, Thomas H. Lee Partners and Texas Pacific Group offered around $35 a share.

Financing problems have wreaked havoc on a second group of potential buyers, which was largely seen as the front-runner in the auction. Buyout bigwigs including the Carlyle Group, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. and Blackstone Group have all withdrawn from the group over concerns about overpaying.

Carlyle, the first to pull out, had done months of due diligence on Univision, but the chilled state of the debt markets and the price the group was willing to pay spooked the firm, sources said.

It’s now unclear whether the group, which includes Hispanic TV programmer Televisa SA, Venevision Investments, a unit of Caracas-based Cisneros Group, Bain Capital and Bill Gates’ Cascade Investments will submit a bid. Foreign ownership of Univision can’t be more than 25 percent according to regulations. That means Bain and Cascade would have to fund roughly 75 percent of the purchase price.

Sources said last night that Goldman Sachs’ private investment arm, which dropped out of the consortium over concern about potential conflicts, may return to Televisa-led group. The debt squeeze isn’t restricted to Univision. Satellite operator Intelsat had to cut its $3.5 billion junk bond offering by $600 million and offer concessions to investors earlier this week.